To Hitsville’s mind, no one has yet adequately explained the phenomenon of Beavis and Butt-head. The MTV show featuring a pair of cartoon teenagers who watch videos seems to engender only extreme reactions–either utter devotion or outrage. The appeal for a certain group is obvious: some people will always love a fart joke. But there seems to be something else at work. For explication, Hitsville turns to Dr. Elmer Schadenfreude, noted commentator on popular culture and the author most recently of the paper “Ren, Stimpy, and the Hegemony of the Pathetic Fallacy, Animationwise.” We submitted to him a battery of queries about the show.
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Heavens, no [replied Dr. Schadenfreude]. In fact the horror with which Beavis and Butt-head has been greeted in some quarters can be traced to those lovable teens. Wayne’s World’s heavily romanticized and comforting depiction of two metalheads–played, incidentally, by a couple of thirtysomething comedy lifers–prematurely eased the fears of baby-boomers wary of the rise of the allegedly angry Generation X. Wayne and Garth’s audience feels betrayed by the sociopathic Beavis and Butt-head. America likes its troubles sweetened, not confrontational.
First of all, Beavis and Butt-head do more than just watch TV: in between sets of videos they wander across an unremarkable suburban landscape, inevitably injecting innocuous situations with terror and disaster. Between home and school and jobs they torture animals, blow up houses, hurt other people and each other, and steal. But the cartoony adventures mask a subtle commentary on adolescence in general, and the boys’ responses to the music videos are particularly telling–those inane snickers contain a complex set of signifiers about the way people consume popular culture. At the first chord of a heavy-metal video, the response is an immediate “Yes!”–nicely conveying the mysterious but instantaneous connection certain teens make to such music. Songs that utilize metal sounds but are somewhat more challenging–“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a good example–the response is positive (“Navarna is cool”) but less visceral. Self-consciously arty or collegiate videos produce long puzzled silences and ultimately dismissal (“If I wanted to read I’d go to school”). And failed new-wave or old-school hard-rock bands, from Wang Chung and Loverboy to the Scorpions, are greeted with derision. (“I’m not just a hair club member, I’m the president!”)
Like at the drive-in?
“Glam rock just isn’t what it used to be, Beavis.”
